Loretta Lynn

Induction Year: 1983

Birth Name: Loretta Webb

Birth Date: 04-14-1935

Place of Birth: Butcher Hollow, Kentucky

Loretta Lynn's storied country music career spans five decades and includes
more than 70 albums (10 of them were country #1s), 65 Top 40 hits (including 16
#1s), two best-selling autobiographies, an Oscar-winning movie about her life
(Coal Miner's Daughter), countless awards and a place in the Country
Music Hall of Fame.As the first line of her signature song goes, she really "was born a coal
miner's daughter." Raised dirt poor in an Appalachian coal-mining community,
Loretta Webb was married at 13. By the time she was 18, she had four children.
Hardly a promising start for a successful life in music. But in 1960, at the
encouragement of her husband, Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, she began singing in
bars. After she cut her first single, "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" (1960), she and
her husband set out in their car, courting radio stations one by one, and
basically inventing what became the do-it-yourself approach of every modern
band.

In 1961, Loretta moved to Nashville. Championed by Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline and
the Wilburn Brothers, she started her slow, steady climb to the top. By the
time she gained her first CMA Female Vocalist award in 1967, she had become one
of country's most beloved and important artists, a stature only cemented
through the years. On classic — and disarmingly frank — songs such as "Fist
City," "Don't Come Home a'Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)" and "The Pill,"
she delivered a strong, unfiltered female point of view as few women had in
any musical genre.

I wrote it like women lived it," she said. "I guess I was different in writing
about things that nobody would even talk about in public. I didn't realize that
they didn't. I thought, 'Well, this is what's going on. I'll write about it.' I
was writing about life."

With Conway Twitty, Lynn was also part of one of country's most successful duos
in the '70s and '80s, with #1 country hits such as "After the Fire Is Gone" and
"Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man."

In 2004, she won a new, younger audience, thanks to Van Lear Rose, her
Grammy-winning album collaboration with rocker Jack White. Going for live
performances and first takes, the hip producer captured a raw, passionate side
of Loretta that had too long been absent from her records.

Today, Loretta still tours occasionally, while running her own publishing
company, campground and tourist attraction in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.